Princeton NJ Schools Articles

In Praise of Failure & Accepting Failures

In a recent New York Times magazine article “What if the Secret to Success is Failure” Paul Tough profiles Dominic Randolph, Headmaster of Riverdale Country School in New York City. Randolph believes that character is the most critical missing piece in education and that “the struggle to pull yourself through a crisis, to come to terms on a deep level with your own shortcomings and to labor to overcome them – is exactly what is missing for so many students at academically excellent schools like Riverdale.” Below is my article first published in the May/June 2005 Parent Bulletin that touches upon the same important theme.

I write in praise of failure. Now I don’t much enjoy failing myself, and I certainly can’t imagine anyone declaring profoundly that they love to fail. Yet failure is definitely underrated.

The fear of failure can become a significant handicap to meaningful learning and professional growth. We witness this fear in the college students who bypass challenging and stimulating classes for easier classes and better grades. We see it in the aversion that some people have to taking risks in seeking a new job, or even in making new friends. Ultimately, however, if we are motivated by our fear of failure, we necessarily limit our potential.

We are also often afraid that our children will fail. We sometimes see failure, whether it be on a math test or a potentially game-winning jump shot, as the cause of irreparable harm. But, as we know from our own experience, every time we fail at something, our mettle and resolve are tested. Each failure gives us a valuable opportunity to learn from our mistakes.

Sometimes in our genuine love for our children, we steer them clear of situations in which they might not excel. Sometimes in our deep concern for our children, we are what have been called “helicopter parents”, parents who hover above their children ready to sweep down to save them at the first sign of trouble. It is so terribly hard for us not to want to “fix it” for our children, but if we do so repeatedly, we hinder their ability to cope with life’s inevitable disappointments.

So, I write in praise of failure. As hard as it is to watch sometimes, our children learn more from their disappointments and failures than they do from their easy successes.

Accepting Failures

Years ago in my prior school, I knew a senior who seemed to have it all.  She was attractive, engaging and funny.  Her entire high school academic record was blemished only by a single A-, all the rest were A’s.  She was also a gifted musician and a good athlete. 

To no one’s surprise, she received acceptances from some of the country’s finest colleges and universities.  She headed off to college with high hopes and great promise.  Four months later she dropped out of college, discouraged and depressed.  Although I suspect that many factors led to her early and precipitous melt-down, the most significant was the difficulty she had in facing failure and disappointment.  Buoyed by untarnished success in high school, she simply was not mentally prepared to deal with the academic rigors of a first-rate college that did not allow her to get straight A’s.  She had not learned how to handle the inevitable disappointments and vicissitudes of life. 

Sometimes, because we love our children dearly, we want to do all that we can to shield them from upsetting or disappointing experiences.  The problem is, in our understandable desire to protect our children from disappointment and failure, we end up handicapping them in the future.  So, it is not a crisis that we need to fix if our child does poorly on a test, or even fails it, nor is it a catastrophe if our child doesn’t get along with a teacher.  It is not a crisis if our child doesn’t get the deeply desired lead role in the play or a starting position on the athletic team.  Yes, these are disappointments, and we all hate to see our children disappointed, but they are also valuable learning experiences.  As F. Washington Jarvis suggests in his wonderful book With Love and Prayers, “it may well be that the most valuable experiences we have in adolescence are not our triumphs or our successes or our popularity, but rather our disappointments and rejections.  We grow more through our suffering than through our successes.”

Although it is very difficult to see our children disappointed and upset, our role as parents is to lovingly support them as they learn how to deal with life’s inevitable disappointing moments.  In learning how to face them and to deal with them, our children gain the strength and confidence to successfully meet the challenges of life. 

Richard Johnson
Headmaster
Chapin School

www.chapinschool.org